Budget Management

Introduction

Bringing structure to community-led giving
Benevity’s Employee Groups platform empowers employees to organize around causes they care about — supporting inclusion, volunteering, and charitable giving at global scale. But as groups grew in size and impact, admins struggled with outdated budget tools that weren’t built for their needs.

We set out to create a new budgeting experience that would help Employee Group leaders request, manage, and report on funds — while balancing the needs of admins, finance teams, and program owners across large organizations.

Admin Budget & Spending dashboard showing the flow of money as groups request/spend allocated funds.

Discovery

Uncovering friction in the current experience
To ground our work, we interviewed group leaders and program owners, and audited existing budgeting tools. We learned that:

• Budgeting processes varied widely across companies — from custom spreadsheets to ad-hoc systems and intake forms.

• Group leaders felt unsure how much funding to request or what qualified as an eligible expense.

• Admins lacked visibility into how budgets were being used and struggled to track spending.

• Program owners needed better oversight and workflows that could scale with their programs.

These insights helped us frame a clear opportunity: simplify budgeting for group leaders while giving administrators the control and visibility they need.

Design

Creating workflows that scale with complexity
We explored several directions—from simple request forms to more configurable tools—and co-developed ideas through design sprints and user feedback. Our solution needed to work for everything from small ad-hoc groups to formal, company-wide ERGs.

• Group leaders could request funding through a guided, step-by-step form that simplified decision-making and ensured consistency.

• Admins could configure request categories, set annual budgets, and assign approvers.

• Program owners had access to a centralized dashboard with budget summaries, request statuses, and audit logs.

• We used progressive disclosure to balance simplicity for new users with flexibility for advanced use cases.

We validated our approach through rounds of moderated testing, stakeholder demos, and a limited beta launch—iterating on flows, terminology, and permissions before rolling it out more broadly.

Admin view of spending request summary for approval.

Admin view of approved spending request with admin notes.

Group leader view - associating a spending request with an event.

Group leader spending request form.

Group leader spending request summary.

Outcome

Driving adoption while enabling oversight and scale
The new budgeting workflow launched as part of a broader update to Employee Groups, and adoption exceeded expectations.

• Within the first three months, over half of active programs had activated the Budget Management feature and were preparing to use it during the next annual budget allocation process.

• Admins reported greater clarity around spending, and fewer one-off support requests.

• Program owners could more easily forecast budgets and identify which groups needed support.

Internally, the feature set a new bar for quality and configurability—informing patterns we later applied to other workflows, like event submissions and impact reporting.

Reflection & Learnings

This project highlighted how nuanced budgeting can be across organizations—and the importance of designing flexible systems that adapt to real-world variance. The most rewarding part was seeing how small UX decisions, like smart defaults and progressive disclosure, helped reduce cognitive load and built confidence for both admins and group leaders. It also reinforced my belief that thoughtful constraints can be empowering, not limiting.

Group leader associating an event with a specific spending request.